Hans Bayer, Gelddenken und Arbeitsdenken (1949)

Hans Bayer’s review essay examines Gustav Wihrheim’s Der betriebswirtschaftliche Kreislauf as a contribution to postwar economic reconstruction. Its starting point is the rejection of merely clearing away wartime destruction and restoring the old arrangements. Reconstruction requires meaningful participation by working people, not their incorporation as insecure, mechanical components of an economic apparatus. Bayer accepts the importance of this ambition while questioning the conceptual framework through which Wihrheim proposes to realize it. The essay proceeds through four principal subjects: money-oriented and work-oriented thinking, the relationship between enterprise and national economy, surplus formation, and economic planning.

Bayer identifies the organizing distinction of the reviewed book:

Das ganze Werk durchzieht der Gedanke der Trennung von arbeits- und geldwirtschaftlichem Denken.

English translation: The idea of separating work-oriented and monetary-economic thinking runs through the entire work.

For Wihrheim, work-oriented thinking begins with useful human activities and their interdependence; money-oriented thinking arises from capitalist rights of disposal and entitlement to returns. Bayer’s objection is that this contrast becomes too schematic. Wihrheim treats economics as captive to profit-seeking and consequently disregards theoretical resources that could strengthen his own inquiry. Bayer invokes modern British economics, Keynes, welfare theory, research on monopolistic competition, and competitive or liberal socialism as approaches already concerned with collective welfare and economic direction. His criticism is therefore not a rejection of planning, but a demand that planning engage the economic theory relevant to its problems.

The first decisive conceptual correction concerns the meaning of productive performance. Technical achievement cannot be judged solely by labor and materials expended:

Die Beurteilung der Leistung hängt aber nicht nur von dem Aufwand an Arbeit und Material ab, sondern davon, was damit an Wert, das heißt für die Bedürfnisbefriedigung der Menschen erreicht wurde, so daß also eine rein technische Beurteilung, oder anders ausgedrückt, die Leistungsformel allein, nicht ausreicht.

English translation: The assessment of performance depends, however, not only on the expenditure of labor and materials, but on what value—that is, what contribution to satisfying human needs—has thereby been achieved, so that a purely technical assessment, or, expressed differently, the performance formula alone, is insufficient.

This distinction between productive inputs and satisfaction of needs governs Bayer’s subsequent criticisms. Wihrheim sometimes allows the combination of work-oriented thinking with usable elements of monetary thinking, including a mixed arrangement in which collective production controls raw materials and strategic productive positions. Elsewhere he presents the emergence of work-oriented thinking as historically necessary. Bayer separates the observable movement toward planning, associated here with Schumpeter, from the stronger claim that history must culminate in Wihrheim’s particular framework.

The second section extends the same objection to economic scale. Wihrheim considers his equilibrium model applicable both to an enterprise and to a country understood as a sum of similar enterprises. Bayer insists that the distinction is qualitative, not merely quantitative. National prosperity cannot be equated with the quantity and quality of output: income formation and the shaping of needs also determine its welfare significance. Treating the economy as one enlarged business therefore obscures precisely what economic reconstruction must explain.

The third section examines Wihrheim’s distinction between permanent equilibrium and a dynamic economy. In the former, wages correspond to produced quantities and values; technical progress requires an accumulating surplus beyond what workers can purchase with their wages. Wihrheim states the mechanism directly:

Die Mehrwertabspaltung ist im Verhältnis zu den erbrachten Leistungseinheiten durch nichtausbezahlte Lohneinheiten entstanden und kann im Grunde genommen nur aus diesen entstehen.

English translation: The separation of surplus value has arisen, in relation to the units of performance rendered, through unpaid wage units and can fundamentally arise only from these.

Bayer follows the resulting problem rather than simply dismissing it. An apparent excess of production may represent genuine overproduction if needs can already be met, or underconsumption if wages do not permit adequate consumption. Investment embodies work whose benefits reach society only in later productive cycles. The central question is how progressively accumulated surpluses can eventually return to consumption. Wihrheim’s socially progressive dynamic seeks rising living standards, adequate wage purchasing power, bounded reserves of consumption goods, and investment directed toward improved productivity. Bayer recognizes affinities with Keynes’s attention to income and consumption, while noting that income formation also occupies Austrian economic theory. Wihrheim’s concerns thus overlap with traditions his opposition between money and work tends to exclude.

The final section tests the framework through planning. Wihrheim contrasts the enterprise’s restricted perspective with an economy-wide view:

Gesamtwirtschaftliche Probleme können nur durch gesamtwirtschaftliche Produktionsideen gelöst werden, die ihr auslösendes Element einem Betrachten aus einer Vogelperspektive verdanken müssen.

English translation: Economy-wide problems can be solved only through economy-wide production ideas whose initiating impulse must derive from a bird’s-eye view.

Such ideas should originate in social considerations and become coordinated production programs. Bayer again challenges their translation into a single aggregate operating process. The proposed nutrition plan usefully connects human requirements to agriculture, equipment, processing, and labor, but technical feasibility alone does not establish whether domestic production places an excessive burden on the economy. Nor does Wihrheim adequately justify his confidence that coordination becomes relatively straightforward after the initial plan.

Price formation brings the dispute to its sharpest conclusion:

Die Ausgangsgrundlage des Preisbildens kann demnach nur die Arbeitsleistung sein, die erforderlich ist, um mittel- oder unmittelbar ein Produkt herzustellen, im Verein mit der ihr innig verbundenen ausbezahlten Lohn-Einheit.

English translation: Accordingly, the starting basis for price formation can only be the labor performance required to produce a product directly or indirectly, together with the paid wage unit intimately connected with it.

Bayer counters that welfare-oriented pricing must attend to value, not labor expenditure alone, and points to the neglected literature of competitive socialism. His closing assessment remains constructive: Wihrheim supplies potentially useful building blocks for a new Europe, but their usefulness requires criticism. The essay’s relevance lies in its insistence that socially purposeful reconstruction cannot dispense with distinctions between technical output and welfare, enterprise organization and national economic relations, or accumulation and effective consumption.